Friday, December 2, 2011

STOCKTON, Calif. - A Calif. high school teacher is now under investigation after school officials said she was running a pornographic website from her school-issued laptop computer along with a Stockton police officer.

Heidi Kaeslin, a 35-year-old special education teacher at Lincoln High School, is now on paid leave while the district investigates whether she violated its code of ethics, The Stockton Record reported.

Kaeslin and Richard Fields, a Stockton police officer assigned to the school, allegedly used the school computer to support several for-profit websites, many of which had adult content.

Fields told the Record he had acquired domain names including mysluttyteachers.com to develop them into websites. Fields said Kaeslin's involvement was limited, and he eventually abandoned the venture. Fields reportedly retired from the police force in May.

The newspaper reports that one of the websites was active for only one day in February, which could indicate a test run.

According to CBS Sacramento, most of the sites have been stripped of their content, some in just the past few days, but the About Us section of one of the sites read:

"This company was created by a young teacher who was inspired, after her male students spent most of the period staring at her boobs, to create the "I Heart Teachers" shirt. Knowing this idea would probably not land her an early retirement, she thought, "Why the hell not" and moved forward with her idea by finding a partner, a computer whiz, and a t-shirt designer. The rest is history..."

Meanwhile, Fields said the allegations are overblown.

Kaeslin, a special education teacher and former girls soccer coach, has been with the district since 2002. Fields retired from the police department in May. The two are romantically linked, according to the paper.

Lincoln Unified School District has hired a computer expert to study the content on the laptop.

Chet Quaide, an attorney representing the district, said the school adopted an ethics code in 2003.

The code calls for teachers to "adhere to the highest ethical standards" and "to attain and maintain the highest possible degree of ethical conduct," he told the newspaper. "The code says that for breaches to constitute "unprofessional conduct," they must "involve jeopardy to student welfare; evidence malice, serious incompetency or bad judgment; or show a consistent pattern of misconduct."